Friday, July 23, 2010

Modelsim by default echoes all set commands to the console. This is b/c of Modelsim's transcript setting. You can either call 'quietly set ...' or just set 'transcript off' at the top. echo will stop working, but you shouldn't use that anyhow, use 'puts ...' in place of 'echo ...' for compatibility across operating systems.

onerror {resume} ... doesn't actually do everything you want it to...

When I use a script with nested procs, and loops, and far down in the stack I call 'eval vlog ...', and the vlog fails, Modelsim will NOT continue from where it failed. This is pretty useless to me as I don't need it to continue further on, but right there. So one file failed vlog, continue compiling the rest! The solution is to 'catch' the error. Wrap 'eval vlog' in a catch. Something like 'catch [eval vlog ...]'. You can also use onerror to perform any error level logging and stuff, but this way it will still continue right where you were.

argv doesn't exist

As most people know, and as is written up on the web a lot, Modelsim hijacks argv. They give you argc and all the arguments appear as %1 ... %n where n is argc. argv is set to '-gui', and that's it.